The Covenant (77 page)

As the quartet rode into Grahamstown, Hilary pointed out the
little houses that had seemed like secure fortresses that day when he faced the screaming Xhosa, and he showed Emma the site on which Tjaart van Doorn had saved his life.

As they rode down the principal street they came to the spacious parade ground where a small church stood on land which would be occupied later by a fine cathedral, and another of Richard’s Hottentot servants hailed the procession to say that Baas was at the shop of Carleton, the wagon builder, so the horses were turned in that direction while the slave hurried on ahead, shouting, “De Reverend kom! Look, he kom!” And to the door of the rude shed in which Carleton worked came his wife, his friend Richard Saltwood and lively Julie, the intended bride. All four looked up at the horsemen and saw Hilary sitting high among them.

“Hullo, Hilary,” Richard said with the casualness that had always marked his behavior toward his brother. “Glad you could come.”

“Hello, Richard. I hear God has blessed you with a bride. He has blessed me, too. This is my wife, Emma.”

From her horse the petite Madagascan smiled warmly at the two women, then nodded to their men. She remembered them later as four gaping mouths: “They were astounded, Hilary. Didn’t you see them, four mouths wide open?”

No one spoke. Emma, with a deep sense of propriety, felt that it was not her duty to do so first, since she was being presented to them, but they were too dumbstruck even to speak to Hilary, let alone his extraordinary wife. Finally the missionary said, “We’d better dismount,” and he extended his hand to his wife.

The story sped through Grahamstown: “That damned fool Saltwood’s married a Xhosa bitch.”

It was an agonizing three days. No one knew where to put Emma, or how to feed her, or what to say to her. They were surprised to learn that she could speak good English and write much better than Julie. She was modest, of good deportment, but very black. There was no way to alleviate the awfulness of her reality, no explanation that could soften the dreadful fact that a decent Englishman, although a missionary, had married one of his Xhosa Kaffirs. When it was pointed out that she was really a Madagascan, one man said, “Know the place well. The bastards ate my uncle.” And now a rumor circulated that Emma had been a cannibal.

Richard quietly insisted that the marriage proceed as planned, with his brother officiating, and the temporary church was crowded,
most of the spectators having come to see the cannibal. It was a moving ceremony, filled with the soaring phrases of the Church of England wedding ritual, perhaps the most loving in the civilized world.

When Hilary intoned these mighty words, standing tall and gaunt, like someone St. Paul might have ordained in Ephesus, he gave them special meaning, for it seemed to him that he was solemnizing not only his brother’s marriage but his own, and when he came to the cry, “ ‘O Lord save thy servant and thy handmaid!’ ” he felt that he was asking blessing upon himself, and some of the congregation suspected this and looked with horrid fascination at Emma, wondering if she could qualify as a handmaiden whose fate concerned God.

The highlight of the ceremony came with the singing of Psalm Sixty-seven, required by The Book of Common Prayer, for then little Emma, who stood facing the crowded church, let her voice soar as she did at the mission, and other singers stopped to listen:

The congregants heard the song but not the words.

On the return trip Hilary said, “It was a dreadful mistake to have come. They saw nothing. They understood nothing.”

“What did you think when you met Vera?”

“It was strange. I’d never seen her, you know. Not really. I moved forward. She moved back. And I thought, ‘How lucky I was not to have married her.’ ”

“You never had the chance,” Emma said.

“I’m convinced God took care of that. He had you in mind.”

“I liked Thomas very much,” she said. “He’ll do well in this country. We need wagons.”

“You and I need one, particularly.”

“Why?”

“Because we’ve got to move north. We’re not wanted here any longer.”

So when they reached Golan and satisfied themselves that Saul could maintain the mission with Hottentot and Xhosa deacons until some young clergyman arrived from England, they started packing in earnest. They acquired a small wagon and sixteen oxen, a tent of sorts and some wooden boxes for their goods. With this meager equipment they set forth.

They headed northwest for a destination unknown, one man, one woman traversing barren lands that held no water, moving into canyons where desperadoes might be lurking, and crossing lands often ravaged by wandering bands of Hottentot and Bushmen outlaws. They had no fear, because they carried almost nothing of value that could be taken from them, and if they were to be slain, it would be in God’s service. They were traveling to take His word into a new land, and they would maintain their steady progress for fifty days. Alone, walking slowly beside their oxen, they went into lands that no white man had ever penetrated before.

In later decades much would be made of treks conducted by large groups of Boers armed with guns, and these would indeed be remarkable adventures, but equally so were the unspectacular movements of solitary English missionaries as they probed the wilderness, these lonely harbingers of civilization.

By accident, and surely not by design, the Saltwoods came at last into that bleak northern country which had provided refuge to the slaves Jango and Deborah, who had fled here with their children. The land was now occupied by a few Bushmen, a few Hottentots who led a vagrant life after their last herds had been bartered away, quite a few runaway slaves from various parts of the world, and a scattering of ill-defined ne’er-do-wells and outcasts. In the veins of these fugitives there was Dutch blood aplenty, German, too, from settlers and sailors off ships, and not a little contributed by English officers on their way home from India and freed during their Cape Town leaves from the confines of British respectability. There was every color,
from the purest black to the fairest white, the last being provided by the new missionary, Hilary Saltwood of Oxford.

He had settled on land in the northern part of the Great Karroo, that rolling semi-desert which occupied so much of the country. It was a thirst-land whose treeless expanse frightened most people but enchanted those who found refuge here. The Saltwoods built their meager hartebeest hut close to a meandering stream, which went dry much of the year. When it was finished, they surrounded it with a thicket of protective thorn, exactly as Australopithecus had done five million years earlier.

The site would have seemed quite miserable, except for the cluster of five hills, each separated from all the others, perfectly round at the base, handsomely leveled off at the top. Their beauty lay in their symmetry, their classic purity of form; from a distance they resembled five judges huddling for an opinion, but from within their circles—say at the entrance to the missionaries’ hut—they became protective sentinels guarding the Karroo from the vast herds of animals that wandered by and from the titanic storms that swept across it. When a man elected to serve God at this forsaken spot, he had the presence of God with him at all times.

One traveler, standing at the door to Saltwood’s hut, avowed that he could “see north to portals of heaven and west to the gates of hell without spotting a human being.” He was, of course, wrong. In various nooks and secret places families had their huts. Behind the flat-topped hills there were whole villages whose residents hunted small animals for their hides, great ones for their ivory tusks. Others traded to the north, crossing the Karroo to where substantial numbers of people congregated. And others, with remarkable diligence, actually farmed the area—one hundred and fifty acres to feed one sheep—and found it profitable. One man mended wagons for customers as far distant as a hundred miles.

But everyone in the Karroo shared in one miracle, and joyously. When spring rains came to this arid land, usually in early November, the rolling plains exploded with flowers, millions of them in a sweeping carpet of many hues. It seemed as if nature had hidden here her leftover colors, waiting for the proper moment to splash them upon the world. In one of his sermons Hilary Saltwood said, “The stars in heaven, the flowers on the Karroo, they’re God’s reminder that He stays with us.”

His duties were many. It was he who marked with ritual the passages of life: to christen, to marry, to bury. He served as arbitrator in family brawling. He taught school. His wife was general nurse to the scattered community. Messages were left at his rectory, the hut by the water pan, and he counseled with all who sought advice on anything. He helped at brandings, attended slaughterings in the hope that he might come home with a leg of something. And he participated in extended hunts when food was needed. He was a vicar of the veld.

But most of all he conducted services, in the open, beside the stream, with the five hills looking down. He read from the New Testament, lingering on its revolutionary messages of social justice, equality and brotherhood. In simple terms, devoid of cant, he talked with his people about new fashions of living in which all men would share responsibility, and he bore constant testimony to the fact that black and white could live together in harmony:

Whenever he spoke like this on Sunday morning, he spent Sunday afternoon wondering about the education of his own children. He and Emma now had three dark-skinned rascals, with their father’s height and their mother’s flashing white teeth. They were bright children, masters of the alphabet at five and their numbers at six. With others in the area, they studied with Emma and took their catechism from Hilary; some of these children were instrumental in bringing their parents to the mission, encouraging them to go through the motions of worship, and all participated when Reverend Saltwood organized a picnic with games and songs and food.

Then the young ones, twenty or thirty of them, of every shade,
would venture outside the five hills and play on land that reached forever. A dozen kinds of antelope would watch from a distance, and sometimes lions would move close to listen and then to roar with chilling thunder.

Adults always sought permission to join these safaris, and sometimes it seemed as if they enjoyed the outings more than their children, especially when great flocks of ostrich loped past or when boys found a settlement of meerkats. Then there was joy indeed as everyone gathered to watch the furry little animals scamper to their burrows, stand upright to see who was watching, and duck swiftly below ground. “Meerkats are like people,” Emma told the children, “they must run around, but they’re happiest when they go back into their homes.”

Hilary could find in the Bible no precedent for a picnic, and he sometimes wondered if he was sponsoring a pagan ritual. There was no instance in which Jesus had participated in such a gathering, but the missionary felt sure that the Master would have approved this glowing combination of fellowship in watching the meerkats and reverence in singing the hymns that followed. And one night he asked Emma, “Isn’t it possible that the miracle of the loaves and fishes should be considered a picnic? Or when He asked that the children be allowed to come to Him. Maybe the Cana wedding guests assembled on the side of some hill in Galilee.”

Such days imparted a happiness that Hilary had never known before. His wife was a woman of infinite richness; her children were a joy; the tattered people who comprised his congregation loved his curious manners and forgave his intrusions into their spiritual lives; and the great, barren land, once one became accustomed to it, provided a congenial home. Best of all, there were no Boers and Englishmen contesting for power, no social stigma because this man was white, that woman black.

And then the relative peace was broken by Dr. Simon Keer, thundering back to South Africa to collect incidents to be used in another book. He was in his fifties now, at the apex of his political power and a furious fighter for causes worthy of his support. He had recently assumed leadership of the philanthropic movement, as it was now called, and had learned how to excite huge crowds in London and Paris with his fiery oratory and dramatic examples of Boer misconduct. His first book,
The Truth About South Africa
, had run its course, and he felt he could best inflame opinion by producing a sequel
showing that the horrors of Dutch occupancy at the Cape still persisted, even though Englishmen of higher moral standards held the reins of government. A supporter had given him a generous loan to fund this trip, counting upon Dr. Keer’s sensationalism to cover the investment.